Indeed the range of activities covered by concepts of theory comprises
a genealogy much longer and more complex than the virtual life of film. As a
form of explanation, theory is ever more important to our comprehension of
contemporary moving image culture, which is ever more powerfully a digital
culture.

Yet in film and media studies, as in the humanities in general,
attitudes toward theory remain vexed. The decades since the 1970s have
witnessed many critiques of theory, mostly unkind.

These attempts to dislodge, displace, overturn, or
otherwise ignore it have taken many forms--against theory, post-theory, after
theory--as if to contain or reduce the wild fecundity of its conceptual
activity or to condemn it to exile. In most cases, these critics have a no more
clear view of what theory is than the thinkers who are supposed to practice it.

The lack of clarity in our picture of theory haunts the humanities, and this is
equally true for its defenders as its assailants.

In this paper I ask: What is theory that is should arouse
such emotion and debate within the humanities in general and media studies in
particular? My response is to argue that a genealogical reflection on theory in
general, and in the philosophy of art and media studies in particular, may help
to restore some conceptual precision to its range of connotations and semantic
values. Genealogy recognizes that theory has no stable or invariable sense in
the present, nor can its meanings for us now be anchored in a unique origin in
the near or distant past.

If the currency of theory is to be revalued conceptually
for the present, we need a history that attends critically to the competing
sites and contexts of its provenance in the past, and which can evaluate the
forces that shape its diverse and often contradictory conditions of emergence
and its distributions as genres of discourse.

Beginning with the metatheoretical
attitude recapitulated in cinema studies’ current interest both in excavating
its own history and in reflexively examining what film theory is or has been, I
will examine the emergence of film aesthetics in the twentieth century from the
perspective of three more or less discontinuous and open genres--expressive,
structural, and cultural.

What can be learned from the variety and
contentiousness of writing on film, especially in the silent and early sound
periods, is that theory itself functions as a medium; it is less a form of
unifying and systematizing a body of knowledge about an object than a mode of
activity or of conceptual engagement, a manner of interrogating one’s self and
debating with others about the nature of what counts as a (new) medium and how
to describe its subjective effects and cultural significance.